Happy three months to Jack!

That's right, Jack is three months old today. That means he's through what they call "the 4th trimester" -- the first three months after birth, which are supposed to be their own special thing, with brain development during that time looking more similar to fetal brain development than baby brain development and sleep patterns not being patterns so much as total chaos. So we did that. 4th trimester: check. Did you hear that, Jack? You're supposed to start sleeping normally now.

Jack and his nana and I started his birthday (which happens to also be St. Patrick's day) off right by having some Irish Soda Bread bought for us his Grandma Milly, who is his only claim to any real Irish ancestry, I think. We are making corned beef and cabbage for dinner tonight, although it's technically not corned beef so much as just plain old brisket because they were all sold out of corned beef on St. Patrick's Day afternoon, of course. But the nice man at the Whole Foods meat counter assured me that if I boiled it in Guinness the way he likes to, we'd never know the difference. Sandwiched in between those two very Irish meals, we went on a little excursion to Salinas today-- Jack's first day in the field with his mommy. This was just a short day, however, a sneak preview or a warm-up for a much bigger day coming up next week for which I will conscript his Grandpa Steve into helping me even though he doesn't know it yet.

As a post-script (and really this should be a post-script on the previous post's script, but then none of you would read it), my grandma read the blog yesterday and told me that Grandpa's old friend Jim Crittenden was married to none other than Isabel Heath! Of HEATH, not the chocolate bar but the stoneware makers. This is the Crittenden family that my dad's family used to vacation with every summer, until the Crittendens bought a sailboat and the Chaplins bought canoes and the two set off for separate waters, so to speak. My grandma thinks their kids might still run the place. So I'm going to have to bring her up with me the next time we go there to see if she knows anyone. And then I'll take her to see the Bay Model. Because I've heard that place is freaking awesome.